Research the market and know everything about your competitors. Make sure you run a full SEO audit and not miss any basics. Ensure that all 404 pages are redirected along with a regular check of XML sitemaps. Manage and check your Robots.txt with the help of Robotto. Optimise well for the images as they also drive lots of visits. Always know about who you are pitching to and ensure that you have all the figures at your fingertips.

Correct usage of English language is extremely important for your website and user experience. Lynne explained how English has borrowed a lot from other languages. Also, pointed out that British English is ‘wannabe French’.

Linguistic Lesson no 1: Just because you dislike something it doesn’t mean it’s American. #brightonseo

James talked about the importance of brands in the affiliate industry. He also emphasised that investing time into, and generating income from, small affiliate websites is an old technique and more attention should be paid to evolve as a true brand.

Use Google Analytics to analyse and identify the audience behaviour and keywords used. Check the top search queries and pages in Google’s mobile search results with the help of Google Webmaster Tools. Google’s Getmometer and PageSpeed Insights are helpful for testing how mobile visitors and bots reach your site.

“Content is not King – it is a kingmaker”. Yousaf Sekander created a tool, ‘Social Crawlytics’, which can help to find and monitor your competitors’ most shared content. Create infographics with full control over the URL. This can be done with the help of your own URL Shortener. Identify the most influential prospects for outreach with the help of Topsy.

Content strategy is not just a blog post. A good content strategy needs peaks and troughs along with a mixture of ‘Big bangs’ and regulars. Some examples of those troughs are quick tips, Q and A, Top 5s and 10 word reviews. Example of ‘Big bang’ content could be ‘X Factor’ which is surrounded by many small shows which makes X Factor ‘the big bang’. Regulars are the standard blog posts and don’t gain as much attention as ‘big bangs’. Data visualisation could be used as really effective link bait. Some good link bait examples: Incredibox and Ross Kemp Folds.

Berian Reed shared some helpful link building tactics. Tynt is a very useful tool that can get you an automatic link whenever someone copies your text and pastes it on any other website. Filter the referral traffic in Google Analytics to check the full referring URL and outreach better. Changedetection.com allows you to check your competitors’ pages and automatically detects what has been changed and when.

Sion O’Connor talked about a client’s perception and how SEOers should communicate with clients. Providing comprehensive, regular and complete reviews of your clients’ campaigns is extremely important. Effects of SEO are very measurable.

The business of SEO and how it can make our world a better place – Jason Woodford

SEO is a fast growing and ever changing industry unlike other sectors. People don’t tend to hold SEO in high regard and many marketers still see SEOers as a bunch of cowboys. Supporting charities can be helpful for the SEO industry as it can help both your company and the industry.

Pinteresting SEO – Danielle Fudge

Danielle presented a new tool:Pinalytics.This tool helps with finding content on Pinterest.This tool will help you to analyse how your own and your competitors’ content is being shared. Most of the users look for funny images on Pinterest.

Anna shared useful custom reports and dashboards from Google Analytics. This was a really beneficial presentation as these reports can help you with an easy overview of your most important Analytics data. Her blogpost will guide you through each report in detail. You can download all the reports as well.

Overall, BrightonSEO was a good conference. The hot topic of the conference was ‘content marketing’ as it is the most talked about topic in the SEO industry.